Eisenhower and the Cold War

Dwight D. Eisenhower, who assumed the presidency in 1953, was
different from his predecessor. A war hero, he had a natural,
homey manner that made him widely popular. "I like Ike" was the
ubiquitous campaign slogan of the time. In the postwar years,
he served as army chief of staff, the president of Columbia
University and finally head of NATO before seeking the
Republican presidential nomination. Although he was skillful at
getting people to work together, he sought to play a restrained
public role.

Still, he shared with Truman a basic view of American foreign
policy. Eisenhower, too, perceived communism as a monolithic
force struggling for world supremacy. He believed that Moscow,
under leaders such as Stalin, was trying to orchestrate
worldwide revolution. In his first inaugural address, he
declared, "Forces of good and evil are massed and armed and
opposed as rarely before in history. Freedom is pitted against
slavery, lightness against dark."

In office, Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster
Dulles, argued that containment did not go far enough to stop
Soviet expansion. Rather, a more aggressive policy of liberation
was necessary, to free those subjugated by communism. But for
all of the rhetoric, when democratic rebellions broke out in
areas under Soviet domination -- such as in Hungary in 1956 --
the United States stood back as Soviet forces suppressed them.

Eisenhower's basic commitment to contain communism remained, and
to that end he increased American reliance on a nuclear shield.
The Manhattan Project during World War II had created the first
atomic bombs. In 1950 Truman had authorized the development of a
new and more powerful hydrogen weapon. Now Eisenhower, in an
effort to keep budget expenditures under control, proposed a
policy of "massive retaliation." The United States, under this
doctrine, was prepared to use atomic weapons if the nation or
its vital interests were attacked.

In practice, however, Eisenhower deployed U.S. military forces
with great caution, resisting all suggestions to consider the
use of nuclear weapons in Indochina, where the French were
ousted by Vietnamese communist forces in 1954, or in Taiwan,
where the United States pledged to defend the Nationalist
Chinese regime against attack by the People's Republic of China.
In the Middle East, Eisenhower resisted the use of force when
British and French forces occupied the Suez Canal and Israel
invaded the Sinai in 1956, following Egypt's nationalization of
the canal. Under heavy U.S. pressure, British, French and
Israeli forces withdrew from Egypt, which retained control of
the canal.